New York in the '50s (27 page)

Why were so many of the rest of us so mad at Kerouac and his book? Perhaps others felt as I did, that Kerouac was not only giving our generation a bad name (“beat”), but by his antics he was also—a worse crime—giving writing and writers in general a bad name, making them look like the foolish clowns that the worst of our parochial hometown critics took us to be. Kerouac seemed to be playing right into the hands of the enemy—Time Inc.—giving them fodder for reams of copy decrying youth, writers, artists, iconoclasts, rebels; dismissing all the people I thought of as
real
writers and rebels in a clichéd generalization of a whole generation as “beat,” which sounded tired and defeated (I thought of us as proud and
un
defeated), and worst of all, silly.

Kerouac later tried to claim that “beatific” was the real source of the meaning of “beat,” but that didn't seem to jibe with drugs and indiscriminate sex. I felt a truer sense of the concept came not from Kerouac's Catholic boyhood, but rather the attitude Columbia's football coach Lou Little had summed up in explaining why Jack quit the team: “Kerouac is tired,” he'd said. (When Mailer met Kerouac a decade later, he felt Jack “was tired, as indeed why should he not be, for he has traveled in a world where adrenalin devours the blood.”)

That night at the Vanguard, Kerouac lived up to my worst expectations. Of course, just by appearing in the role of entertainer at a jazz nightclub, he was by my standards compromising himself as a serious writer. Reading poetry to jazz was one of the new fads associated with the beats, much ballyhooed by one of the practitioners, the elder statesman of the San Francisco avant-garde fringe, Kenneth Rexroth, who dubbed it “jazz-etry.” Ivan Gold thought the
term as pretentiously silly as the “art form” its fans proclaimed it to be, and suggested one night over beers at the Kettle of Fish that instead of “jazz-etry” they ought to call it “po-azz.”

By whatever name, the whole thing sounded spurious to me, and a
novelist
reading his work to jazz accompaniment seemed even more transparently a show business rather than a literary enterprise. Something in Kerouac himself must have felt the same way—either that or it was stage fright—for he was drunk by the time he appeared on stage, dropping the papers he was trying to read from, slurring his words, swaying back and forth not in time to the rhythm of the music but simply as a man does when he is trying not to fall down.

Kerouac was wearing an open-neck sport shirt with gold threads that glistened in the dark and a pair of brown slacks. The outfit itself seemed buffoonish to me, for the “writer writers” I knew, even the Village rebels, wore a jacket and tie when they gave readings or took part in panel discussions. Seymour Krim, that lover of the avant-garde, always appeared in public wearing that black corduroy sport coat, along with the trademark thin tie. The Young Socialist leader Mike Harrington, even when he lived at the Catholic Worker's hospitality house in the Bowery, wore a jacket, no matter how threadbare, when speaking at a public meeting. Dan Wolfe, the editor and cofounder of the
Village Voice
, who always had on a coat and tie, told me years later (still in coat and tie) that “being a bohemian didn't depend on how you dressed, it depended on the decisions you made.”

Proclaiming your rebellion by the clothes you wore was one of the many factors that separated the traditional bohemians from the beats. The new attitude made clothing a statement of rebellion, a political act, as in Kenneth Rexroth's famous line from his poem on the death of Dylan Thomas: “You killed him, in your goddam Brooks Brothers suit.”

Kerouac started off his set by reading a piece about his pal the bartender at the Cellar in San Francisco, one of the beats' hangouts. I looked toward Lou, the bartender at the Vanguard, to get his reaction. When Kerouac finished, Lou shook his head and said, “He won't make many bartender friends if he keeps on usin'
that
.”

I drifted from my stool at the bar to try to hear other reactions.
People who I guessed were leftovers from an uptown office party were shifting restlessly at their table and speaking under their breath while Kerouac read, until one man shushed the others into quiet and explained, “Some people like this stuff.”

There was scattered, perfunctory applause when Kerouac finished, and I followed him to the room backstage where the trombone player J. J. Johnson and his sidemen were sitting around a table talking quietly—and soberly—at their break. Kerouac pulled up a chair to the edge of their group, but no one paid any attention to him until he asked Johnson, “What did you think of what I read?” Johnson, a dignified Negro from my hometown of Indianapolis, stared at the reeling writer a moment and asked politely if he had written it himself. Kerouac admitted he had, and after a pause Johnson said diplomatically, “It sounded very deep.”

Kerouac complimented Johnson's trombone playing and said he had always wanted to play saxophone himself: “Man, I could really work with a tenor sax.”

Johnson eyed him coolly and said, “You look more like a trumpet man to me.”

That was all Kerouac got from the pros.

He returned to the spotlight to read a piece called “The Life of a Sixty-Year-Old Mexican Junkie,” and I made my way to a corner table in the back, where some of his friends were sitting. There was in the author's corner, I would report, “one seaman, one poet, and one blonde.” The blonde was Joyce Glassman, whom I knew from around the Village. She was a former Barnard girl who sometimes worked for publishers, and was writing a novel of her own. (
Come and Join the Dance
was published four years later; under her married name, Joyce Johnson, she published a fine memoir of Jack and the beats, in 1983, called
Minor Characters.
)

Joyce was Kerouac's current girlfriend, a fresh-looking young woman of twenty-two with a round, pale face of the smoothest white skin, framed with straight honey-colored hair that was set off dramatically by the standard beat women's outfit she wore: black sweater, black skirt, black stockings and shoes. Obviously uneasy about the evening's proceedings, she loyally defended Jack, explaining the he didn't really like this business of performing in a nightclub, but it might help the sales of
On the Road
. “If it gets back
on the best-seller list,” said the practical Joyce, “they may take it as a movie. If he sells it as a movie, he won't have to do
this
sort of thing anymore.”

I had no sympathy, but went back home, around the corner to 10th and Bleecker, and wrote a low-key put-down of Kerouac's performance, ending by comparing it unfavorably to the reading I attended earlier in the evening over at NYU by one of my favorite poets, Richard Wilbur, whom I'd heard lecture the past summer at Bread Loaf in Vermont. I made the point that Wilbur, at thirty-six, was only a year older than Kerouac, but they were opposites in personal as well as literary style: Wilbur was a tall, blond, happily married husband and father who believed—in life as well as in art—in the virtue and power of what he called, in a poem that gave the title to one of his books, ceremony.

Sweating beneath the spotlights of a nightclub, Jack was “on the town,” I wrote, while Wilbur was really the one who was “on the road, who has been all along.” By that I meant the poet was on the same quest as the “writer writers” were, for a deeper understanding and the expression of it in language.

A few weeks later, Kenneth Rexroth came to New York for one of his jazz and poetry readings, and complained about my piece to George Kirstein, the publisher of
The Nation
. I wasn't surprised, since Rexroth was one of the principal champions of the beats, and besides, my article also made fun of his famous line accusing society of killing Dylan Thomas in a “goddam Brooks Brothers suit.” If clothes could kill, I wondered, what genocide would be wreaked by Kerouac's gold-threaded shirt?

“Who is this Wakefield, anyway?” Rexroth demanded. “Some stuffy old guy who works for Time-Life?”

Kirstein said no, Wakefield was a young guy—I was twenty-five at the time—who eked out a living as a free-lancer and lived in the Village.

That didn't fit Rexroth's image, but he argued that anyway I
sounded
like some stuffy old guy who worked for Time-Life.

“Frankly,” Kirstein told me over lunch, “I was beginning to feel uneasy, like maybe we were wrong to run a piece putting down the hero of this important new literary and social movement, the whole beat thing.”

I started to defend my Kerouac piece when Kirstein smiled and held up his hand. “Mr. Rexroth was wearing one of those string ties—the kind of cowboy western thing like a shoelace—and he asked me, ‘You know why I wear this string tie?' I said, ‘No, Mr. Rexroth, why?' and he leaned across the table and said, with utter seriousness, ‘That's my way of sayin' fuck 'em!'”

Kirstein, who was always elegantly clad in expensive-looking European suits, shook his head in disdain of an act of rebellion he considered so tepid, if not tacky. “I wasn't worried anymore about publishing your piece,” he told me. “I figured you had the right fix on it.”

It was anyway the general consensus on Kerouac's gig at the Vanguard. He closed after seven nights, a week before the scheduled finale.

I saw Kerouac at a couple of parties in the Village over the next few years, but kept my distance. He always seemed sulkily drunk and hostile, which his friends said was defensiveness, his self-protective reaction to the sudden onslaught of public praise and damnation brought on by
On the Road
. I'm sorry I missed the sweetness and playful sense of humor others saw him display. Bill Cole, the popular Knopf book publicist, watched Kerouac entertain at a party by holding his arms close to his sides and falling forward like a tree that was felled, catching himself the moment before he hit the floor. “He was like a kid, proud of his stunt, getting a kick out of entertaining everyone,” Cole recalls.

The resident Village sociologist, Ned Polsky, was at the Riviera bar off Sheridan Square one night when Kerouac was proudly celebrating the purchase of a house for his mother in Florida; he said he was going down there soon to write.

“Jarvis Braun was there that night,” Polsky remembers, “and when he heard about the house, he told Jack he'd been thinking of going to Florida himself, and he'd like to come and stay for a while. Now, Jarvis was supposedly the model for the hipster in Anatole Broyard's essay “Portrait of a Hipster” in
Partisan Review
—he was known for borrowing money and living off people, drifting from one person's place to another, eating their food and staying till he was kicked out. So when he announced his intention to come to visit
at the new house Kerouac had bought for his mother, Jack suddenly stood up and recited a poem he composed on the spot, ‘Jarvis Braun, Don't Come to Florida.' It was hilarious. He declaimed it to the whole bar and had everyone in stitches.”

Maybe I missed Kerouac's playful side because I tended to avoid him at bars and parties after my put-down of his Vanguard performance came out in
The Nation
. I knew if he'd read it he wouldn't like it, and I didn't want to have a bad scene over it. When I did meet up with him face-to-face again five years later, I was assured beforehand that he was in a mellow mood and no longer hostile—at least not on that particular afternoon. The guarantee of Kerouac's new equanimity was given me by a young research psychologist down from Harvard, Timothy Leary, who had come to New York to dispense a new drug called psilocybin to creative artists as part of what he told me was a scientific experiment.

I met Leary at Allen Ginsberg's apartment in the East Village, where I had gone one snowy Sunday in January 1961 to interview the poet for an article I was writing on marijuana. I had been apprehensive about meeting Ginsberg, fearing he would have Kerouac's hostility to writers who weren't part of the beat scene or exhibit the kind of condescension with which some of the beats treated outsiders they regarded as squares. To my great surprise and relief, I found Ginsberg friendly, businesslike, and helpful. He gave me information from his own experience and from his files, making me feel welcome among the many friends and hangers-on who flopped or crashed or simply “fell by” (in the new hip lingo) his place in those days. He was like a practical saint who sheltered and fed the floating population who passed through his pad; every time I was there he was roasting chickens to feed whoever was hungry at the time.

When I got to his apartment, Allen introduced me to Dr. Leary, who looked like an eager fraternity alum among the more laid-back beats. When Leary heard I was a journalist writing about marijuana, he immediately wanted to tell me about psilocybin. Since Allen was on his way out to buy more chickens to feed the growing company assembled that afternoon—including a glowering Kerouac, whom I didn't approach—Leary suggested we tag along with Ginsberg and all stop for a beer at the corner bar.

Over our beers, Leary regaled me with stories of the wonders of
psilocybin, offering to give me some to try for myself. It was a wonderful stimulant to creativity, he said, which was why he was so excited about trying it out on some of the poets and writers gathered at Ginsberg's that day. He was going to give them pencils and paper and see what they wrote after taking the drug—that's what I gathered was the essence of his “scientific experiment.”

With his crew cut and bubbly manner, Leary seemed more like an overeager salesman than an experimenter seeking data. (Not long afterward, he was dismissed from Harvard and went on to independent guru-hood, as did his fellow researcher Richard Alpert, who later transformed himself into the best-selling holy man known as Ram Dass.) Leary sounded like a pitchman for a new cure-all elixir as he told me this drug not only stimulated creativity, it made people feel so good they lost their old hostility.